Rodney Koeneke's Blog, page 7

Current Mood for the Oracle at Delphi

"The session's gorilla on vox humana."

Poetry Month in Portland

November brings a perfect storm of poetry activity to Portland, including ... well, too many to name and they're listed in the sidebar at the right. Fun starts Saturday, when San Diego scops K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace blow through town to read with Common Pornographer Kevin Sampsell. Sunday matches up New York's "Angel Hair" Lewis Warsh with 2009 Oregon Book Award finalist Alicia Cohen. Details for each at the Tangent and Spare Room websites: both series are under new roofs.

The Haunting

I'll cop to having never heard of Hauntology , the music or the French theory, until six hours ago when Michael Cross posted David Brazil's extraordinary talk on the subject at the Berkeley Art Museum this weekend. "Because we're creatures who love and remember we are haunted" vaults into the instant Top 10 Apothegms of 2010 list I just made up upon reading it.

Hannah Weiner Revelations

A procrastinating weekend webcrawl brought up Robbie Dewhurst's enlightening paper on Hannah Weiner's Country Girl (which, thanks to Patrick Durgin , you can read in typescript here ) and the news-to-me that Weiner's newly discovered last manuscript, The Book of Revelations, is now up on her home page at the Electronic Poetry Center. It's tough reading online, scanned from notebooks written in pencil and crossed into overlapping strips, but if you've got more than a weekend surf session to burn, there it is for the electronic ages. "speak so as no one will listen" says page 6, not knowing so many no ones would. 

Robbie's post also got me wanting to spend time with Page, which he describes as Weiner's Behind the State Capitol. Would like to read that too, if I could find it cheap and complete; the sections from it in Wieners's Selected are the Tibetan LSD of postmodern American poetry. More weekends, please.

Treat

Not All Bad

"As he forbade killing the deer, so also the boars; and he loved the tall stags as if he were their father."

The Pleasures of Attention

 "Conjures the taste of the maraschino cherry from my father's Manhattan on my childhood tongue and all that it intimated about the catastrophe of masculinity."
 (Joining Gertrude Stein and George Friderich Handel as accountants of the repeats in "desire's circuitry" is sweet, too.)

The Waste Land in Comic Sans

Since I found it, I keep thinking about Morgan Myers's posting of The Waste Land in rainbow Comic Sans , most dissed of all fonts. Herodotus tells the story of the pharaoh Psammetichus, who left two newborns with a shepherd, free from language, to find out what their first "natural" words would be. I'd like to play Psammetichus to someone with The Waste Land, and see what came of a blank-slate reading of "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" in canary Comic Sans. Shantih!!!

Dept. of Monday (Tsvetaeva Edition)

"Property is      water"
(Taken from "Poem of the End," one of the best breakup poems ever written, even in translation. It's the one with Tsvetaeva's famous "All poets are Jews," and the less-quoted but maybe still better "listen/to this flesh./It is far truer than poems." "An Attempt at Jealousy" isn't too shabby on the breakup front, either. In case there's anyone out there looking for great breakup poems on a cold fall Monday.) 

New Tangent

Still warm from the afterglow of Karen Weiser and Anselm Berrigan' s reading , Portland hosts Rachel Zolf, David Wolach, and The Oregonian's intrepid poetry columnist, B.T. Shaw, tonight at 7 PM. The economy's reached out and toppled the Clinton Corner Cafe, kind host to Tangent for the past four years, so the action's transported to the green new Open Space Cafe , at SE 28th and Holgate, in the Brooklyn neighborhood. So Rachel can feel right at home.

B.T. SHAW lives in Portland, where she edits the Poetry column for The Oregonian. Her first collection, This Dirty Little Heart (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), won the 2007 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry. She teaches at Portland State University and the Independent Publishing Resource Center (despite her wariness of staplers).

DAVID WOLACH is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and an active participant in Nonsite Collective. His most recent books are Occultations (Black Radish Books, 2010), the multi-media transliteration plus chapbook, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), the full-length Hospitalogy (chapbook forth. from Scantily Clad Press, 2010), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). A former union organizer and performing artist, Wolach's work often begins as site-specific and interactive performance and ends up as shaped, written language. Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, and visiting professor in Bard College's Workshop In Language & Thinking.

RACHEL ZOLF's poetic practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her fourth full-length book, Neighbour Procedure, was released by Coach House Books in 2010. Previous collections include Human Resources (Coach House), which won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Masque (The Mercury Press), Shoot & Weep (Nomados), from Human Resources (Belladonna books) and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks). Born in Toronto, Canada, she lives in Brooklyn.